Basically no Quicktime events. (There are a few “run away across a collapsing building” scenes, but they generally use moves you’ve mastered anyway.)

Not as many cutscenes in general. You mostly get to control your own camera!

No gallery of ‘friends’ who do nothing to help and are there mainly to get in trouble and/or get killed.

No snotty ‘friend’ who’s set up as the obvious betrayer. (There is a betrayer, but they provided a plausible motivation this time.)

Almost all of the game is set in Siberia, looking for the lost city of Kitezh. Now, Kitezh is a city from Russian folklore which supposedly resisted the Mongol invasion by slipping into a lake. A Rimsky-Korsakov opera has it becoming invisible instead. Also it’s supposedly near Nizhny Novgorod, which is not in Siberia.

Whatevs. Here it’s founded by Byzantines, who’ve come from Syria, led by their Prophet, who seems to have the secret of eternal life. An evil cult named Trinity wants this, and so does Lara Croft, but in a much nicer way.

On the plus side:

It’s really pretty; the mountains and the forests and the various ruins are very well done.

It has much bigger areas to explore, and you’re able to mess around all you like. (There were some small hubs in the first game, but there wasn’t much to do in each one, and the plot was always hurrying you on.)

I like Lara’s voice actress, Camilla Luddington. There’s much less character development this time, so most of the work of making Lara likeable comes down to the voice acting, and Luddington makes her sound earnest and concerned. OK, that may sound dull, but compare that to your basic space marine, who usually sounds indifferent and/or bombastic.

There is less emphasis on “hard enemies which mess with what you’ve learned so far”, which is fine by me. E.g. you have armored enemies, but you also have some good options against them.

The basic gameplay loop is fun. Sneak around, shoot arrows or bullets at people, solve some physics puzzles, do some mild parkour. Everyone who’s passed through Kitezh– Trinity, the Byzantines, the Mongols, the Soviets– is fond of leaving ruins which can only be traversed with Lara’s particular gear– climbing pick, rope arrows, etc. Some places even give you a choice of route!

Honestly the open world aspect can be wearing. There are optional tombs scattered around– you’d might as well do as many as you can, since they offer perks. There are challenges and optional missions and resources to pick up and animals to hunt and relics to find and… well, if you like that sort of thing, there’s a lot of it. The first time I played the game, I put it aside halfway through, and I think it’s because of all this cruft. I feel like I should do everything, but it becomes a chore.

I’m enjoying it more now, mostly because I’ve given myself permission to skip anything I don’t feel like doing. Anyway, in general, this isn’t a Bethesda game, where the main questline is the dullest of them all. They put the most work into the main story.

On the minus side–

I don’t mind dying to enemies– the fights always seem fair, and if I die it’s my fault and it’s usually easy to see why. But I hate dying because I missed a jump, especially if it has fiddly positioning or timing to it. The game doesn’t even have the excuse of Mirror’s Edge, that it’s about split-second button presses. Rather than falling to her death, Lara should recover, like Batman. (You could make her repeat the last bit, if you want mistakes to have a cost.)

The plot idea of ‘vindicating Dad’ is far less interesting than the first game, which moved Lara from frightened young girl to badass warrior woman. Once she’s that badass, there’s little she really needs, so the emotional temperature drops a bit.

There’s another sequel coming out later this year, so I hope I’ve put Trinity down by the time it comes out.

Edit: Finished it tonight… I really wasn’t far from the end. The final boss fight isn’t terribly hard, which is also fine by me.

Though they lost the character arc from the first game, I think the story here is a lot more meaningful. The story in the first game is more or less “try to escape this extremely dangerous island which Lara’s dad for some reason wanted to get to.” Here, it’s all related to having the secret of immortality… it’s not any more believable, but at least you can see that it has big consequences which explain why everyone is after it.